Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed
vice.com
vice.com
Quite famously, the police are much better at shooting children [1] than they are at shooting to protect children.
The Uvalde PD consumes 40% of the town budget ($4m of $10m exclusive of a $500k grant they got from the state of Texas months earlier). 19 police officers were on scene and sat twiddling their thumbs for an hour despite repeated 911 calls from students inside. Oh actually not quite nothing: they threatened to violate the probation of a mother on scene [2].
There's an obvious upside to this particular shooter dying but it has one unfortunate side effect: Texas allows information to be suppressed when the suspect is deceased [3]. Had he lived it would've been inevitable this bodycam footage and other evidence would've come out. Now? We'll see.
I've now lost count of the number of times to story has changed from the Uvalde PD. But nothing here will change.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tamir_Rice
[2]: https://sports.yahoo.com/uvalde-mom-ran-school-save-02574885...
[3]: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/04/22/texas-law-allows-pol...
It's hard but it's important to keep faith, and to keep working to change people's minds about police. Even your comment can make a difference: a place like HN is full of intelligent people who generally come here fairly open minded. Maybe your comment - the top one right now - can open someone's eyes to what cops really are. Stay in the fight!
Firing all of the current PD staff seems like a great first step. Trick is, do you hire more in their place, and how do you pick them?
It is however a reason to call in the FBI and, if necessary, deploy the Army so you can make anyone so inclined to rot in a prison cell.
Finally, you bring each and every one of them up on any charges that can be filed against them.
"Just give away your guns. You don't need them for protection, you and your kids will be safe with the police" "Me? Oh it's different. See I need theses armed bodyguards with me and my kids. For security reasons you know!"
The choice now is whether to believe that law enforcement at the local and federal level simply turned a blind eye, or they knew and helped guide this individual to action in order to use the public reaction to advance the gun control agenda.
And while some will recoil at the thought of organized terror attacks in the US, we have to acknowledge that terror attacks by the state are not unprecedented. The communists, the nazis, the current russian empire all utilized terror attacks to advance their state policy. For example, right before the Crimea referendum to join Russia, terror attacks against the civilian population “were discovered” by FSB forces that swung their support to joining Russia.
Source: grew up in Texas, still have all my well-armed family there.
Seriously though — you’re arguing this is a conspiracy to increase gun control, in which a local Texas PD is complicit? The United States is false flagging us into increased gun control by sanctioning the murder of little kids?
That’s pretty bonkers.
Don't forget those "/s" tags, folks!
Yes, there are people that 100% believe this. They have drunk the whole damn pitcher of kool-aid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
The only difference is that I'm asserting that this is happening in America too, which for some reason you think is bonkers. Though most likely you'd readily accept it happening everywhere else that's not America or it's strategic partner countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
It's a discomfiting thought that's simply easier not to have.
Which is backwards. Dead people don't have any privacy rights.
There should be no reasonable reality in which the release of this footage is suppressed. This is an undeniable tragedy, battening down the hatches and obstinately trying to weather the storm will do no favors for anyone.
They pretty obviously are just embarassed by their failure.
This is my sneaking suspicion.
>“When the cops came, the cop said: ‘Yell if you need help!’ And one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard and he came in and shot her,” the boy said. “The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting.” The police got a student killed, according to the survivor’s story.
https://www.vox.com/2022/5/27/23143997/the-uvalde-police-kee...
Seriously... WTF! If only they showed the same balls when dealing with the gunman.
It seems not: https://www.tcole.texas.gov/sites/default/files/CourseCMU/Ac...
This is extremely at odds with how the police want to be perceived, and managing that contradiction is certainly their biggest concern right now. From that perspective it's easy to understand why they want to suppress this information, and who benefits if they get to.
These aren't unfortunate dolts who bumbled into a tragic response because they weren't equipped to deal with it. This sort of thing is a predictable result of the training and prioritization police act on every day.
Its why I'm not above calling for purges and complete overhauls of the approach to policing.
Absolutely untrue, and has been for decades. Their hesitation to react and go in is the complete opposite of what they were trained to do, which is go in and eliminate the threat immediately. "The official narrative has shifted from a story of swift response by the local police to one of hesitation and delay that deviated from two decades of training that instructs officers to quickly confront a gunman to save lives, even at a risk to their own."[1]
>These aren't unfortunate dolts who bumbled into a tragic response because they weren't equipped to deal with it.
Except that, from everything we've learned about this event in the weeks since, they literally were not equipped to deal with it. Police chief didn't bring a radio, their own radios didn't work in the school, they bungled getting a key to the room, they didn't have their tactical materials arrive in a timely manner, I can go on and on.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/us/uvalde-shooting-police...
There is also a well-documented history of police coming up with convenient excuses to do whatever the hell benefits them most (see also: bodycam "malfunctions"). Don't want to get involved in a dangerous situation? Whoops, I forgot my radio! Whoops, we don't have the right gear! Guess we can't get involved for more than an hour!
trained to do, not compelled to do
they won't be charged with a crime because they broke no law
they probably won't be fired either because their union will sue and probably win if so
they won't all be put on desk duty because the local govt cannot afford to hire replacement better-cops while also paying all of the worse-cops to sit at a desk
Right, and it's pretty fucking sad that "kids getting shot" isn't enough to compel them to do their jobs.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/09/uvalde-chief-pete-ar...
In particular he did bring a radio but decided to remove it. Read the article for why.
There are children being shot and he's worried some radio antenna's gonna smack him as he ran, or that one might fall off his belt? Bite your lip and put up with the antenna whipping you, and/or put the other radio on your belt, hoping that it doesn't fall off, and if it does, at least you can say you tried.
I realize we're talking split seconds, but it doesn't take long to clip a radio, as you're walking, to your belt.
The "someone" might have a little more skin in the game than you do, though.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And this is where, circumstantially, you and I seem to have a fundamentally different viewpoint. We'll just keep going in circles.
This is fundamentally wrong. If it were ok, let's just disband them all and save a lot of money since their responsibility doesn't benefit anyone other than themselves. I reject the concept of a society where this is somehow ok.
The idea that first responders can solve anything is a very comforting idea that resonates with many people. That doesn't make it true.
If the police cannot do their jobs to save children from being killed by a school shooter then they should not be police officers. They should not be militarized and given advanced equipment, they should not pretend that they ever need it and their budget shouldn't be the majority of a town's spending. And if they don't like it, then maybe the police and the police union can do better campaigning on actual ways to stop school shooters instead of using it as an excuse to further increase their own budget.
Over the lives of children, though? Putting your life in danger to save a random guy's life is heroic, but not expected. You're both adults, your safety isn't guaranteed, and it's not guaranteed that you'll be able to save him. But it's quite different when, instead of a random guy, it's a group of children.
I think that's the striking difference with Uvalde. It's really, really hard for me to imagine firefighters not rushing into a burning elementary school to get the kids to safety. Societally, we expect them to, and they know we expect them to.
Society also expects the same from police (laying down your life to save a child), but I'm not sure these police fully understood this societal expectation at the time of the incident, or else they would have acted differently.
And yet...
>“People are going to ask why we’re taking so long,” a man who investigators believe to be Chief Arredondo could be heard saying, according to a transcript of officers’ body camera footage.
>By that point, officers in and around the school had been growing increasingly impatient, and in some cases had been loudly voicing their concerns. “If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there,” one officer could be heard saying, according to the documents.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/us/uvalde-shooting-police...
They aren’t holding up their side of the deal here.
This is not any different for any first responder. Firefighters will run right back out of your house if they think it's required to save their own lives.
What's the point of militarizing the police if they can't handle 19-on-1 situations?
Police militarization helps the police protect themselves when a situation gets out of control. I don't think there's much evidence to show that it ever helps police protect others. Although, there's a lot of reasons why people might be misled to believe so.
Soldiers use that equipment in a very different way, are way better trained and compensated, and have a very different set of rules to work with. And very rarely is it their mission to swoop in and save innocent people.
What about all of the times heavy-armed police teams burst into residences during Swatting incidents?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdwgn/uvalde-swat-team-brag...
People risk or sacrifice themselves to save others with some frequency. Just a week before Ulvade, Dr. John Chang gave his life to tackle the shooter at his church in Orange County. Bravery exists. The belief in bravery is why we give special privileges to law enforcement. If we knew that police would never put themselves in harm's way to save children, we would never tolerate law enforcement as it currently exists.
If we hired every one-in-a-million hero as a police officer in the US, we'd have 165 police officers.
There's about 700,000 police officers in the US, and we can barely hire them as it is.
In the Commonwealth a police officer would likely get a George Cross for extraordinary bravery (the Victoria Cross is the medal for extraordinary bravery in the face of the enemy and so accordingly it is awarded to the military). New Zealand police officer Stewart Guthrie was awarded (posthumously) in 1990 for confronting a gunman who'd killed a dozen people. Guthrie warned him, "Stop or I shoot" but the gunman shot him first.
But of course such awards are rare because such events are rare in Commonwealth countries.
I agree, but that has always been a perception, and it has never been a reality.
Evolutionarily we have even higher desire to protect our young(so does most of animal kingdom).
The instinct to protect young children is stronger than desire to protect self - the trait is easily strongly selected under evolutionary pressure.
https://westdene1985.co.za/reports/the-survivors/
"
>>Koen, Petrus Lucas received the Wolraad Woltemade award posthumously. The 17-year-old drowned after rescuing his cousin and five fellow school pupils.
>>Du Toit, Daniel Sarel, aged 14, dived back into the water three times and saved three lives.
>>Mahner, Alfred who drove to the site, jumped into the water and helped several children to safety and assisted the fire brigade to attach cables to the bus.
>>Opperman, Gotlieb Rudolf, aged 15, was rescued in an unconscious condition from the bus after jumping back into the water three times to rescue children.
"
Out of the 700,000 police officers in the US, there are undoubtably hundreds, maybe thousands, of them that would voluntarily sacrifice their life to save others. The other 99.9+% of them do as much as they can and but still want to go home to their own children.
If we're willing to remove these things, then I'm more than fine with not expecting them to handle dangerous situations.
What has seemingly happened in Uvalde is a complete betrayal of that typical response. Officers contained the threat, allowing it to fester inside the school for an hour. When going in, they focused on the children instead of the shooter, getting even more children killed because of this.
That they are not legally required to put themselves in harm's way does not mean their coordinated response must be whitewashed.
Expecting the police to follow those best practices every time is not any more reasonable than expecting any other profession to follow best practice every time. The reason we don't legally require them to prevent crime is that it's an unachievable standard.
Expecting i follow the industry best practice is the MINIMUM. It is reasonable that my employer expect me to store my passowrds/api keys everytime and that i do not publish them on github/gitlab. It is also reasonable that my APIs are protected. Its is also reasonable that i monitor if my services are up or down. I don't understand why a police officer would not be held by the same standards.
Also, ~7 years ago, i was a counselor at a youth camp for police orphans. The three directors were from the RAID (SWAT equivalent in my country) and the medical assistant from the CRS (specialized police for riot control). They might have oversold their heroics, and those of the parents of the children we created activities for, but even then, any one of them would've gone inside as soon the shooter was contained.
If your data isn't protected by law in the US, chances are that data processors are most likely not following many data protection best practices.
The police are under no legal obligation to protect and serve, https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...
It's hard to fault the cops on this one. The 2012 Florida nightclub shooting was a roughly comparable situation - barricaded shooter, substantial firepower, hostage situation.[1] It took three hours to stop that guy, and the cops had to punch a hole in a wall with explosives and an armored vehicle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting
If so, that is a clear cut case for banning it completely.
https://www.facebook.com/uvaldepd/photos/a.935317536501604/2...
I wish more of the world could function like the culture adopted by the western airline industry where every incident and investigation is treated as an opportunity to learn and improve the system rather than an opportunity to lay blame.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for anyone directly impacted to expect there to be consequences for the lack of preparedness, etc., but I think the big picture needs to be more along the lines of realizing that kind of unpreparedness isn't part of some grand plan or conspiracy and that working to improve the system for next time gives us better overall value (long term) than punishing the people involved.
At least for government institutions, I think that kind of system could be mandated as long as employees get the same deal as pilots. In exchange for willful participation, with the goal of improving the overall system, you aren't punished for anything that was an honest mistake, misunderstanding, lack of training, etc..
Unfortunately, the nature of US politics is such that it's impossible to have reasoned conversations about how to alter these extremely complex and dynamic systems. Entire areas of the solution space are rejected because of ideology, and those rejections, themselves, are highly politically charged.
In what should be no great surprise, later, when the problem isn't resolved, fingers get pointed at those who rejected those alternative solutions or pushed for solutions that did not work, while those who previously got in the way of a more fulsome discussion continue to do so because the foundation of their ideology cannot be shaken by real world data.
So, yes, it would be nice if the world could function as a reasonable and rational place, but when it comes to wedge issues like this, that simply will not happen without fundamental structural changes to the nature of US politics.
All that being said, given Boeing's recent performance, I'd be a little careful to hold up the airline industry as a paragon of rationality and preparedness...
If the airline industry had kept that culture we wouldn't have had so many incidents with the Boeing 737 MAX.
I'm not saying no mistakes were made. Of course mistakes were made. It was my assumption that the typical "post-mortem" process of those crashes did happen.
One of the many things NASA does for the US which affects ordinary people who aren't ever going to the Moon, let alone Mars, is ASRS. https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ The purpose of ASRS is to report safety problems that weren't accidents yet. That's how you continue to improve safety when there are a tiny number of fatal accidents - by studying all the things which nearly went wrong. The pilot who nearly turned off his one remaining engine after losing one on a twinjet, the controller who nearly authorised a new pilot to fly straight into a mountain before checking the radar again.
Most safety culture can't aspire to that. In many cases maybe it would be overkill. Therac-25 not withstanding, most software engineers are not going to kill anybody through their incompetence, and we'd do well to even manage a Mortality and Morbidity conference culture (M&M is what medics do when patients unexpectedly die or have seriously negative outcomes, to try to prevent such things in future). Even most of aviation isn't that safe. General (the pilot isn't getting paid, they're doing it for fun or at least as their own choice) is very unsafe. Commercial (e.g. Crop dusting, News helicopter) is better but not great. However Scheduled aviation (you can just buy a ticket, like for a bus) had reached the point where ASRS was the key to likely further safety improvements, and yet somehow Boeing shipped the 737 MAX.
My father is a retired airline pilot and we loved talking about safety, how things can fail and how there is a culture of learning for everyones mistakes. I mostly remember the pilots replaying actual crash scenarios.
But you are absolutely right, ASRS and learning from almost-failures is also critical.
So, is it going to be Law and Order for thee, paid suspensions and additional training for me?
In this case I believe a [grand] jury of peers would have found had the officers gone in and just taken the suspect out, they would have been justified.
Sadly we have more and more of a Law and Order society than an Orderly Justice one.
There is no one left to prosecute here since they killed the shooter so there is no reason to delay disclosure.
That thin blue line looks more and more like a line for cowards to hide behind while they seek to escape accountability for actions they know would have them arrested if they had no badge. Simply holding their noses while a colleague escapes prosecution for criminal acts by hiding behind a badge or a brotherhood of LEO is about as chickenshit as it gets.
Can you transpose those goons to modern police officers?
Half the country has known this for a couple years now. It's a shame it took the deaths of children for the rest to start to figure it out.
I'm about 6 years into one lawsuit to disclose the contents of a jail Policy and Procedures manual. The AG ruled that it was all subject to disclosure except the bits about locks and keys and where the weapons are stored. The jail is free to ignore the AG ruling and continues to maintain that even the sections on how the jail library books are top secret.
It's absolutely impossible to know if the jail employees are doing their jobs as they are supposed to without the public knowing what those roles are and what the job requirements are. You can't keep these people honest without knowing if they are abusing their positions.
Public disclosure should be the mandatory default for public bodies.
For some reason they only issue binding rulings in a tiny fraction of very contentious cases. It sucks. It doesn't make any sense to me. It can take two years to get a non-binding ruling on a case just for the public body to ignore it.
Public bodies definitely need to be careful about what they write in emails. It's funny to read about how yourself in their internal emails and what they are planning for you.
we are here in this debate over and over after columbine, sandy hook and countless others because there is strong minority who either don’t care or believe gun freedom is worth the cost. I don’t think uvalde is going to change that overnight
[1] What defund the police really is or should be about
at this point I assume cops shot those children
The police went in to save their own kids, but detained and chastised parents who went in to do the same. How many more trained experts with guns we do need to stop school shootings? Should townsfolk have enough guns and force on their side to subdue the police so that they can go into classrooms themselves as an impromptu tactical force?
(Generalization of course, but true in many life-and-death situations.)
These kinds of situations are outrageous because people want to believe in superheros, but they don't exist.
Perhaps it's not the rest of us who are the problem.
You should not go into a profession that entails personal risk if that prevents you from meeting your obligations to the public. I surely wouldn't call actually following the department's policy and training in response this event superhuman in any way, though pretending it is serves to absolve those who failed in their duty.
If we could choose our police like our cell service, I'd pay for the police force that required military service or punished officers who did not act when they should
We vote by wallet for our cell service and we vote by ballot for our police budgets. If you can only afford a house in a neighborhood with a Cricket Wireless tax base, then you get Cricket Wireless quality police.
And you're free to start a new wireless company. But try starting a new police force and you'll get arrested. Not the same.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/creating-your-ow...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_police#United_States
In fact, schools are a good example of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_police#United_States
Creating a new police force is probably not any harder than making an MVNO and probably much easier than acquiring spectrum to create a real wireless carrier.
Online publication "The Root" paraphrased this (source: https://www.theroot.com/uvalde-mom-who-saved-her-children-sa...) as: "Angeli Rose Gomez told CBS News that she was informed that if she continues to talk to media about her fearless actions, she would be charged with a probation violation for obstruction of justice."
Can't find where I saw that right now.
"But Gomez said the judge overseeing her probation told her she did not face new legal problems and that her bravery would be rewarded with a shortened probation."
https://nypost.com/2022/06/04/angeli-gomez-says-she-was-thre...
At any given time, yes.
If they are "serious" about gun control or not would certainly be up for debate, but I have heard this argument many many times.
There's sufficient consensus on both the stronger/weaker gun control sides to agree that police are the most tactically equipped to deal with an ongoing crime, and that you should not interfere with professionals who are already at the scene.
The police even threaten parents with obstruction of justice and violating probation for merely talking to the media about running into the school.
Realistically, I think what this situation means is that the police, at least in Uvalde, need to be disbanded and reformed and serious steps need to be taken to ensure their failure is not repeated. I think such serious steps include charging the cowardly officers with murder. Future Uvalde officers should know it is more dangerous to refuse to face the school shooter - and one path for that is if they know they will get the death penalty for being complicit in the mass murder of children if they just cower outside while the massacre happens.
If I were an Uvalde prosecutor (and I'm not even a lawyer so I have limited knowledge of the law) then I would charge the police on the grounds that they protected the murderer from the parents without actually doing anything to arrest or kill the murderer. The police were effectively serving as protection for the murderer. It would be legal for the police to detain the parents in the course of the police doing their duty - for example, the police could hold the parents back while other officers engaged the shooter, but if the police aren't fulfilling their duties then they have no legal reason to detain the parents and are therefore engaging in criminal acts to facilitate the murder of children.
I would take a list of the children who died and charge all of the non-responsive officers with the murder of the first child on the list under this theory. If a jury rejected it then I would charge the officers for the second child on the list, possibly with an updated theory of the crime to account for double jeopardy or to anticipate the police officers defense, and keep going until I found a sympathetic jury or ran out of victims.
If the supreme court, or any superior court, would overturn this case that would have to happen after the case was decided in the lower courts and while the officers languished in jail and I would fight to delay any overturning as long as possible.
Apart from the law, the basic facts of the matter are that nineteen children were murdered and the police are largely responsible for that fact. Of course the murderer is the one who ultimately killed the children, and bears the most culpability, but the police had ample time and opportunity to engage the murderer and save the children and did not. Morally, the police are absolutely responsible and I think a creative and aggressive prosecutor could find a way to present the fact pattern such that a jury would agree.
I disagree because I use a different bar for "sufficient". I never have a conversation with people (or online) within the midwest states without a jab at the ineffectiveness of LEOs. There's been a national consensus for awhile, which has been diminished, for sure. For many, Jan 6 was another event showing that the lack of police action can lead to outrageous events that were previously fantasy. Confidence in police (local or not) has been eroding for decades and this is a tentpole event that will be referenced in the future.
They are suggested. Many people carry mace/pepper spray. Tasers are finicky and require a fortunate prong placement in the attacker, and the attacker to not be wearing thick clothing, or it just doesn't work. Stun guns require you to be upclose and personal with the attacker. If you're a smaller/weaker person, this is extremely risky.
Most non-lethal weapons are for you to get away from an uncommitted attacker as quickly as possible, not to stop a serious threat in its tracks. If someone has a weapon and intent on killing you, a firearm is your best bet in stopping them.
Years ago I once made a joke that Tesla could pivot into that by inventing a "lightning gun." Given Musk's descent into attention-grabbing memelordom, I'm surprised he hasn't suggested such a possibility yet, to unilaterally solve all these controversies in the news, himself.
Sufficient blunt force to some area to stun someone will kill them if it hits elsewhere.
Tolerances for electricity are different between people (Tasers do kill people).
Mace and pepperballs don't fully incapacitate someone.
Lightning guns (or really any directed energy weapon) have problems with exponential decay.
Tranquilizer guns might work, although I don't know how wide the dosing range is.
It's a hard problem. People still die from anesthesia, which is basically trying to keep someone incapacitated in a very controlled setting.
Gun control does not remove your ability to protect yourself. This is a false premise. Even in a world where the US government institutes mandatory buy backs of anything that looks like a gun, you are not completely devoid of options to protect yourself.
Statistically, aside from some very specific places in the US like the bad parts of LA/Chicago/New York, you are far more likely to die of suicide by firearm than you are of homicide by firearm.
Bump stocks were outlawed. What impact did that have on self-defense?
What impact did restricting assault weapons have on self defense?
You are making a claim here. It is necessary for you to back up your claim with evidence. The goal post already moved from the original comment I replied to, which is fine. To avoid further wriggling, though, we need data.
Violence is decreasing everywhere else too (dropping lead gasoline and screen time are the probable drivers).
The US is still an outlier as far as gun deaths go.
This sounds like a "no true scotsman" fallacy. If your definition of someone who is not serious includes people who say "rely on police to help", then it is circular logic.
I think it might be quite a bit easier to confront a shooter when its obvious that doing nothing will result in your death. In this situation in particular I can't imagine how armed teachers would have made it any worse, but can certainly imagine it making it better.
I can also imagine dozens of ways arming teachers makes things worse for that 10 9s of time where there's not an active school shooter.
Honestly in a decade they will beg the pro gun control people to save them so maybe we should do this?
Other other take: military bases have very strict gun control, far in excess of the civilian world, despite hopefully being far more reliable, stable, and law-abiding than the general population. It makes them more vulnerable in certain rare cases, but they judge it to make them far safer in general, so the rules stick.
Other other other take: pro-gun people and pro-gun organizations sure are eager to keep gun-toting randos way the hell away from themselves, most of the time. Super weird behavior if they think more guns make them safer. See also: most courthouses even in red states, et c.
When it actually matters, it's pretty clear what is regarded by basically everyone as making a place safer: fewer guns. It's only when people are talking a big game that they absolutely aren't willing to back up, that they claim to believe the opposite is true.
The "good guys with guns" clearly had no investment in a positive outcome, unlike the parents who were fighting the police to save their kids. A "good guy with a gun", by definition, has a personal, moral obligation to save lives...something that those police obviously lacked, so classifying them as such is disingenuous.
[EDIT] My main point is just that we already know how to reduce gun violence. People with power, even if they're publicly extremely pro-gun, don't want people with guns around them unless they're paying them or they're cops. Organizations with the ability to curtail gun possession do so enthusiastically and almost universally, even if their members & leadership claim the solution to shootings is more guns in more places. So we flood the world with more guns and save (let's be extremely generous) 5% of the people who'd have been murdered with guns. Great. Wonderful. Could have done a lot better by doing the opposite, though.
I was responding, originally, to:
> It sort of blows up the whole pro gun control argument that citizens shouldn't be expected to have to protect themselves but instead rely on law enforcement :p
Maybe it was a joke, but it's a bad one when some people actually think that.
I'll reconsider my position when major organizations and government buildings and such start shifting to encouraging gun possession by people who aren't in law enforcement or the security staff. Meanwhile, it doesn't look like it's even controversial in any context other than partisan hacks promoting positions they don't (apparently) believe: keeping guns away is much safer than allowing them. I can tell this is true based on how, again, damn near everyone behaves when they have the choice to ban them or allow them, including the very people promoting more guns as the solution to gun violence. It is only not the obvious solution when the game isn't safety, but politics.
You can believe that people shouldn't want/need guns while also believing they should be able to exercise that right if they want to. I hold that belief. Guns aren't for everyone, but who am I to deny someone of their right to defend themselves, for example, from an abusive ex-partner.
> [the videos] just show the parking lot. how is that useful
The only time this should ever be legal is if the footage is of the officer using the restroom.
Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, even requesting that body cam footage be suppressed is a blatant admission of guilt.
In the court of public opinion? Maybe quite a bit.
“Specific duty” has an established legal meaning here. It means that the police have already established some agreement to protect an individual beyond what they normally do for the general public. That’s clearly not applicable to this situation.
Or more like just create transparency in this case, I don't know if they did anything criminal or not.